Tag Archives: lighting

The in basket: Richard Holl said in a March e-mail that the
Agate Pass Bridge in North Kitsap needs better lighting.

“At night the bridge becomes a black hole that absorbs light,”
he said.” All you can see is the oncoming lights of the cars
coming at you. You can’t see the sides, the center line, the bridge
walkway. Nothing.”

“God forbid if anyone sticks their arm out from the walkway. All
a driver can do is aim for the middle of the blackness on their
side of the road and hope for the best. Maybe you can see
better if there is no oncoming traffic but I couldn’t tell
you the last time I crossed that bridge at night when there was no
oncoming traffic,” Richard said.

“Contrast that to the new (Greaves Way in Silverdale) where
there is very little traffic. I bet you can see that road from
space at night. If you roped the road off, you could play a ball
game under those lights.

“I know they are different projects and different funds, yada,
yada, yada but what the hell ever happened to a little common
sense?”

The out basket: Steve Bennett, the traffic operations engineer
for the Olympic Region replies, “The standards for lighting on a
bridge state the bridge should be lit at the same level as the rest
of the corridor. As there is not continuous lighting on the
corridor, there is no requirement for lighting on the bridge.

“We also checked the collision rate on the bridge and found that
in the last 11 years almost 90 percent of the collisions occurred
in the daytime and it is not clear that any of the night time
collisions would have been prevented with the addition of
lighting.

“Of the twelve collisions that occurred at dawn/dusk/night,
eight were rear end collisions,” Steve said. “It is unlikely that
night-time lighting would have helped prevent these because the
brake lights of cars tend to show up better without overhead
lighting.

“An additional three crashes occurred because drivers lost
control of their vehicle and struck the bridge rail,” he said.